Quote#Poetry
Your settlement may be at hand; But that it is still at some distance…
Quote byEdmund Burke · 1729–1797
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont (November 1789), quoted in Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (eds.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VI: July 1789–December 1791 (1967), p. 46. Burke was quoting Joseph Addison's Cato.
English (original)
Your settlement may be at hand; But that it is still at some distance is more likely. The French may be yet to go through more transmigrations. They may pass, as one of our Poets says, “thro' many varieties of untried being,” before their State obtains its final form.
— Edmund Burke
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